Practical limits for Apple entry level applications

Q: “Can you determine what the approximate limits are of: Address Book, Mail, iCal, or other Apple software. I’ve heard that having 15,000 emails is about the limit to Mail, beyond that and you run into trouble. Any thoughts?”

A: The Apple Technical Note found here clearly states that the Maximum File Size is 2 to the 63rd bytes. So clearly its not a file size limitation that is hardcoded.

Practically speaking more than hundreds of anyone of those types of files will slow down the application depending on hardware. I am not sure that you can define hard limits before it becomes unusable. I personally rescued a user whos mail server went down in their company and they had 40,000 message and found it usable on a new macbook pro with 4gb of ram.

I think you could probably chart it if you took into account the average memory requirement of each message and then divided it per messages. For example, Apple Mail I understand takes 4kb to load one email into memory. So using that as a rough figure, you could get about 1.4 million messages theoretically into Mail. I suspect however that Apple would not support that. Apple has repeatedly said they are a consumer company so I would suspect that scaling like this would not be supported. For example, I remember reading something about the kernel being limited to a certain amount of memory so I can’t imagine that it would allow this kind of process to continue.

Personally the less information you put in your apps the better. I think a database that is backed up is a much better way to approach this, and not depend on the client to maintain information. I would not advise anyone relying on backups to manage data over the GB level. It it just not reliable enough to do so. Data deserves more protection than can be found in entry level Apple applications. Filemaker would be my first choice to manage data, and it really makes exporting it a breeze.

(Please note: I am not saying that Apple or the applications are not reliable enough. No single point of failure should be allowed with regard to data. Since hard drives can be damaged or die unexpectedly the idea that you can just back it up on the client I believe is a dangerous one. While I am not totally in favor of the server as the only point where the data resides, I think due to the managed nature of servers it is a better primary place for data. I would like to see data on the client replicated for off-line uses)

2 Replies to “Practical limits for Apple entry level applications”

So at what point would you move from Address Book/iCal/Mail to using a database like Filemaker? If a business only has 300 clients on a consistent basis there may not be the need to move to FMP. But on the other hand, when is it best to consider moving to FMP?

I took Oracle classes and you don't do that without a significant commitment by Management. Access is popular but a bear to work with and not user friendly at all. MySQL is popular and helpful if you ever want to use Social Media like WordPress or many other Open Source technologies. I also had the great fortune to program in Filemaker and it is easy and fast. It is ODBC compliant which means it can work with any Microsoft centered workflow. I think that for small business there are only two real choices. Filemaker, mySQL and the first is much easier than the second.

The second however is mostly free it just takes an investment in time to learn and understand it. What is especially great about databases is that adding another user is as simple as adding them to the users file. You don't have to configure and import data manually like you would have to do with a client-based solution. The security is great to manage, and you have a central accounting and control. Yes they can have stand alone databases if they want, but this sort of defeats why you use DB. To share the intelligence/work of everyone for a competitive advantage. After all isn't the reason we love Google because they share the database with everyone?